Here is an account that will, once and for all, put to rest the widely held myth that computers must have been invented by individuals who themselves were basically automatons.
In FROM DITS TO BITS, the reader is given a very personal look behind the scenes at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania. There, in the late 1940's, a group of young scientists struggled in their quest to devise a technology that could one day relieve man of the burdens which so encumbered his imagination and wasted his free time. This book says, perhaps above all other things, that the roots of this technology are grounded in motives and ideas as altruistic as those of any artist.
Here are recounted the problems, successes and failures experienced by the author as he worked alongside John Mauchly, Presper Eckert and a number of others who are today recognized as the prime innovators in this field. The technology that has been developed from these beginnings is perhaps best known today for the role it has played in the simplification of recordkeeping. But most important is the contribution the computer has made to the efforts of researchers who seek answers about everything from earthquakes and bird migrations to the activity of cancer cells and the challenge of putting a man on the moon.
This is the story of the people whose efforts and imagination gave birth to man's most significant extension of his own potential . . . the computer.
HERMAN LUKOFF parlayed his boyhood interest in amateur radio and a natural curiosity into a career that today finds him numbered among the handful of scientists credited with the invention of the electronic digital computer.
Having seen his brainchild come into its own in the 70's, Mr.Lukoff now takes a look backward that tells, at long last, the story of the people whose motivation and imagination were the source of what may well be the single most important technological development of the century.
Mr. Lukoff, presently Director of Technical Operations at the Sperry-Univac Corporation in Pennsylvania, renders insights into an element of the computer industry that has been thus far neglected . . . the people who made it happen. Through his personal involvement he manages to show that the computer, despite much popular opinion to the contrary, was invented by and for people.
This is his first book.
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